


Through A Firewall Gap

by Cosmic_Biscuit



Category: Tiger & Bunny
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Cybernetics, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 14:04:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmic_Biscuit/pseuds/Cosmic_Biscuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even for a company as important as Apollon Technologies, beta testing isn't the most exciting or glamerous of second jobs. At least not until a glitch turns out to be much more than a glitch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through A Firewall Gap

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ThisRedCat](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ThisRedCat).



He didn’t much do more than shrug when the order came down from the management offices. While none of the guys on the dig sites were much technically inclined, the eye implants they were all required to have to see in the mines made them good guinea pigs for the media companies, so he was used to testing products on the side. It made some extra credits, and he could always use those. Even though he didn’t exactly live lavishly, bills and commute in and out of the city to his assigned station still weren’t cheap.

  
The chunky plastic container that arrived in his mail chute was unmarked, as always, and when he opened the flaps, the sleek black box inside bore the familiar gold sun and radio tower sigil that Apollon Technologies had used for the last century.

  
 _‘Thank you for coming to our assistance once again, loyal test aide,’_ began the note inside, and Kotetsu rolled his eyes a little at the also familiar cheesy greeting before skimming the specs that followed. The little key system lying in the box was apparently some kind of game that was supposed to interact seamlessly with the basic systems and programs already in most implants, creating a fully-immersed sensory environment _‘like no game has ever done before!’_

  
Yeah, sure. He’d heard that kind of spin a thousand times. Maybe a few more than that.

  
Still, a job was a job. Pulling out the instruction sheet, he tapped his left temple to activate the command panels for his eyes and began integrating the hardware and software.  
‘Here goes nothing,’ he thought, closing his eyes and ‘pressing’ the final command key.

  
When he opened his eyes again, he was standing under a flowering tree in a sunny park. He blinked in surprise as his senses registered the breeze blowing the grass and loose leaves and petals, the scent of the air, the sound of air rushing through the branches and of kids playing on a swing set near by. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen or smelled a park as nice as this one.

  
“Damn,” he muttered. Maybe they were on to something with this.

  
“Hello.”

  
Kotetsu started at the unexpected voice, then turned to find a boy of about fifteen standing beside him where there had been empty space before. Blond haired and sleight, the kid stood to his shoulder in simple playground clothes, regarding him with sharp green eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

  
But there was something just slightly off about him. A strange sort of aura that set him apart from the rest of the game environment, just a little bit out of sync. Weirdly enough, it seemed to read as… sadness?

  
Strange.

  
Kotetsu swallowed. Was he supposed to be noticing this? Was it part of the game? “Who are you?”

  
“I’m your guide,” The blond said, smiling, but that aura didn’t fade.

 

===

 

He tried to ignore it at first, letting his nameless new ‘friend’ lead him through the commands to act and control his inventory in his new environment. It was apparently some kind of time-traveling detective game, which had the potential to be fun, really. Though he hadn’t really had time for that sort of thing as of late, he used to love cheap holo-novels when he was a kid.

  
But the deeper he went, the more his companion bothered him. There were things the boy would say that just didn’t match up to the environment, or times he would seem to forget what he was doing and have to take a second to catch up. It could have been glitches, or maybe intentionally done to make a NPC seem more human, but then… there was still that heavy air about him that just wouldn’t go away. It wasn't something he'd ever experienced in Apollon's games before, this emotional _tug_. It just didn't seem their style to put something like that into what was otherwise a fairly cut and dry operating system.

  
Finally, on the third day of testing, Kotetsu couldn’t stand his curiosity anymore. “Do you have some kind of backstory I should know about?” he asked bluntly as they were investigating a body in an old run down hotel.

  
To his surprise, the kid blinked at him, then gave him a bright, _honest_ smile. “You _noticed_.”

  
As Kotetsu stared, the setting around them subtly shifted, a slight alteration of coding making the room look a little newer and more forbidding all at once.

  
At the same time, his guide’s appearance altered as well. While the oppressive aura eased, his features certainly didn’t. He became thinner -much too thin to be healthy- angles prominent in all the wrong places. His pallor washed out to an almost lifeless pale, dark circles ringing under his eyes, and the shadows created by his hair falling in his face only made them look even darker. His clothes changed from the casual shirt and jeans he’d been wearing to some kind of creepy-looking form-fitting white suit that made him look even thinner and paler.

  
Kotetsu swallowed thickly, feeling a little sick to his stomach. “What-“

  
“I have a lot to tell you,” his guide said, voice soft and weak and painfully hopeful as he took a step forward. The shadows around his eyes and the dim lighting of the room made them almost seem to glow. “But I have to know first… can I trust you?”

  
“Trust me?”

  
There was another, less subtle shift in their surroundings, and Kotetsu heard a beep in the back of his head that he recognized as the testing software registering something invasive. His guide stiffened, a brief expression of fear crossing his face before he quickly backed away, and Kotetsu finally figured it out.

  
“You’re not supposed to be here at all, are you? You’re an avatar, not a glitched program.”

  
“Correct.”

  
Which meant that whoever he was, Apollon was going to come down on him like a ton of carbon steel when they discovered he’d been using their test hardware to… whatever it was he was trying to do. But- “Why me?”

  
The blond’s expression made his throat feel like it had closed up. “All the times I’ve tried to get a signal out, either I was blocked before I could make contact, or no one would notice the parameter changes and initiate before I lost connection. You’re the first who's ever paid attention this long.” He hesitated, then held out a hand. “Please… can I trust you?”

  
The answer only made more questions whirl in his mind, but he had a feeling he wasn’t going to be able to ask them without setting off the warning signals. And… he didn’t want the kid to get caught. He couldn’t explain why. He just had a _feeling_ about it, and he’d learned from the mines work to never ignore those.

  
Reaching into the back of his mind, he pulled up the command panels again and began fiddling with the connections. When he felt the key system’s viral detection go off with a soft beep, he took a deep breath. “All right, then,” he said, reaching out to touch the blond’s hand. It sent a warm little tingly feeling up his arm.

  
The boy closed his eyes in a brief moment of relief, then the setting around them washed away entirely to a cold, forbidding room of black and silver metal filled with blinking computer banks and flashing screens. All were connected to a single chamber that glowed blue from where it was embedded in a wall at the end of the room, and when Kotetsu screwed up the nerve move close enough to peer inside, he felt his stomach lurch. Suspended inside the fluid-filled chamber was his guide, looking as though he were merely sleeping despite the hundreds -maybe even thousands- of electrode and wire connections to his suit and his head. “Where the hell are we?”

  
“This is the central processing hub for HERO. All the information and command networks lead here.”

  
Forcing himself to look away from the macabre chamber, Kotetsu examined the screens, and found that sure enough, there were substations for every one of Apollon’s myriad of assorted private and city functions, all connected to the still little body. “But… HERO is supposed to be-…” he started to say, then trailed off weakly as it all began to sink in.

  
He wasn’t entirely surprised to find out that such a widely-functioning and media-hailed artificial intelligence could be an overblown lie. Everything had to come from _somewhere_ , of course. But the fact that it was all functioning through the mind of _one kid_ who was apparently being kept here against his will…

  
Kotetsu swallowed back nausea. “What do you need me to do?”

  
“My parents think I’m dead,” his guide said quietly from beside him. “I’ve seen those broadcasts. I’ve never been able to get out long enough to contact them to tell them otherwise. I’m not sure I even remember where they live anymore.”

  
“What are their names?”

  
The blond stared at the floor without response, and after a second, Kotetsu looked over to see that his hands were clenched by his sides and he was biting his lip as he clearly struggled to think.

  
 _‘He can’t remember that either,’_ Kotetsu realized, and automatically reached out to hug the boy when he started to tear up. “Shh,” he soothed, rubbing a thin back and trying not to think about how he could feel each vertebra and rib. “We’ll figure something out. I’ll find them, I promise.”

  
The boy pulled himself back together and drew away, wiping his eyes. “Thank you,” he mumbled quietly, before the room around them began to bleed back to the hotel of the game. “My connection’s getting weaker. I only have one more level left before it’ll be gone. We’ll have to set up some other way to make contact.”

  
“Right, then. You work on that, I’ll do some news digging,” Kotetsu said, giving his guide’s hands a squeeze before the level connection ended.

  
When the system had finished its shutdown process and he found himself staring at the ceiling of his room, he slowly reached up and rubbed his head. Media conspiracies and hidden teenagers used as programming fuel… what in the hell had he gotten himself into? Had he lost his goddamn _mind_? He was just a mine worker for hell's sake, he wasn't cut out for this kind of thing. This was international spy shit.

  
But as he sat up, he could almost still feel a cold, thin body clinging to him for comfort, and he bit his lip. Whether he liked it or not, he had involved himself in this by taking that offered hand, and now the kid was depending on him. He couldn’t just wash his hands and walk away from it now.

  
“Okay, then,” he muttered under his breath. Disconnecting the game key system from his implants, he packed it back into the box for the night and got up, going to grab the datapad he used to check the news off the kitchen counter. “Lucky thing I’m off from the mine tomorrow,” he muttered under his breath as he pulled up the first archive.

  
“Open Window One, Tab One. First System Search: publicized missing children cases.”

 

===

 

Even narrowing down to the cases that had actually managed to garner media attention, Kotetsu was _appalled_ at how many children had been kidnapped in Sternbild in the years before he’d moved to the city.

  
And he couldn’t help but notice just how much that number had gone down since the HERO system had been implemented. Benevolent law enforcement assistance on the part of Apollon… or was his little guide doing extra work on the side trying to make sure no other poor squirt ended up like him?

  
Drumming his fingers on the counter, Kotetsu finally checked the time on the datapad, then reached over and punched in a code for some extra strength rejuvenation tea. He barely waited for the cup to finish filling before grabbing it and returning to the hunt.

  
The HERO system gave him an idea. The time it had taken to be built and debuted was too wide a frame to work with, but if it was the kid’s _brain_ they needed… He refined the parameters to exclude all cases except children of prominent scientists or who'd been recognized for any kind of scientific achievements themselves. Broadcast windows whirred around him as the system searched through all the information archives, and then a series of news reports with five year old timestamps flashed up in front of his eyes.

  
As soon as he saw the faces of the family on the screen, he felt his chest clench a little.

  
Bingo.

  
He briefly wished he’d thought to go with something stronger than tea, but took a heavy drink of it anyway and braced himself before setting the information to download into his implants.

  
The Brookses were the pride of Nova Londonium. They’d been honored by the Royals and the British Parliament, as well as the UN, for their work in medical prosthetics and memory recovery assistance. Their son, a bright-eyed, cheerful-looking child who only bore a structural resemblance to the pale ghost in the data filtration chamber, had proven to be a short-falling apple.

  
In fact, the whole reason they’d been in Sternbild to begin with was because there had been an international programming competition and summit held at the Feingold Center, and at ten, little Barnaby was the youngest ever prizewinning entry.

  
Kotetsu’s fingers tightened on the cup when he saw the pictures of the center. He _did_ remember that incident. It had been only a few months after Tomoe had been shipped off to boarding school, right around when their communication transfers began trailing off because they'd both been so busy. He remembered seeing reports on every broadcast frequency about the center being bombed, of an ashen and harried-looking couple making a plea for searchers to keep looking for their son, missing in the chaos of the explosion. It had gradually faded out of the news in the outer mining towns - though it had probably still been a big thing for years in scandal-hungry Sternbild - so he had eventually forgotten all about it.

  
Wanting to know what he missed, he skimmed forward in time through the news, finding a reports dated five weeks later. A hacker group calling themselves The Hydra had taken credit for the bombing and the kidnapping of Barnaby Brooks Jr., demanding releases of information and inmates in exchange for the boy’s life. But when police had managed to track down a hideaway house and raid it, they’d found that the hackers’d had no ties to the case at all, and had only been trying to draw attention to themselves and their cause. No body had ever been recovered, and there had been no other ransom demands.

  
The last file was dated two years after the bombing, and it was only a tiny blurb about the Brookses having finally given up hope on finding their boy and returned to Britain.

  
Seeing the pair huddled under an umbrella and boarding a plane, looking broken and like they’d aged twenty years in two, made him sick to his stomach. He closed down all the files and opened his eyes, then took another sip of tea to calm the nausea down.

  
He could still see the afterimages of the videos in his mind, superimposed over the memory of his guide and that creepy blue chamber.

  
One deep breath, then two, then he scratched the back of his neck and straightened up and mentally laid out what he had so far. One, he was sure that this was no trick. Two, he was sure that his guide was telling him the truth. Three, he was sure that the ghost in the game was the missing Barnaby Brooks Jr.

  
And four, he had to find a way to contact Barnaby and Emily Brooks and somehow make them believe parts one through three.

  
“All right, kid,” he said to the empty air. “Here goes.”


End file.
